BORIS Johnson has warned there is a “big budget of risk” in reopening schools but insisted the biggest risk was not reopening them.
At a Downing St press conference, the Prime Minister highlighted how almost 22.4 million people, more than one third of the entire UK population, had now been vaccinated. And numbers continued to fall with people in the last 24 hours being tested positive at 4,712 and deaths at 65.
Welcoming the return of millions of pupils back to school in the first major easing of lockdown measures in England, Mr Johnson declared: “This has been a big day and an emotional day.”
He went on: “We all know that the education of our children is so important that the greater risk now is keeping them out of school for a day longer.
“I want to thank all the teachers who have got their schools ready and who have been teaching throughout the period; whether that is remotely or in person, your work has been astonishing.”
The PM also thanked parents who had been teaching their children at home and noted how the burden had fallen disproportionately on women “often holding down jobs and providing childcare at the same time”.
He stressed the Government’s job now was to ensure pupils not only caught up on lost learning but took the “biggest possible step forwards with a concerted national programme for educational recovery”.
Dr Jenny Harries, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, said that while pupils returning to classrooms would have an impact on the R infection rate, schools would be “inherently safer places” due to increased testing.
“We do expect there to be an impact on R. What we do know is, or at least we can’t disentangle, the social interaction element of that rise in R. So, it’s just as likely it’s people meeting at school gates or the different numbers of social interactions as much as it is in schools.
“The critical point is there are new interventions, so the testing for schools is in place, starting from now and gradually for some senior pupils going forward.
“What that is likely to do is diminish the number of community transmission cases which could come into schools, so schools will be inherently safer places, but equally it will reach back into families.
“So, although I suspect we may see a rise at the start, with luck as we go forward and people get used to using that testing whole families will be protected as well,” she explained.
Dr Harries played down suggestions schools could be forced to close again if new cases emerged.
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“We can be very optimistic going forward. The testing programme in schools should mean that the likelihood of a case going into a school and then numbers of children having to come out of education to isolate should be very significantly reduced.”
Asked if he would consider speeding up the easing of lockdown, Mr Johnson said he understood the urgency but the Government had to take a cautious and prudent approach based on the data.
“Don’t forget they are still very high by the standards of last year; we still have thousands of people in hospital with Covid,” he declared.
“We have seen, alas, in other European countries that the curve is going up again and we remember frankly what happened every time we’ve seen those upwards curves in our friends and neighbours that it is not too long after that that we see an increase in this country as well.
“We’ve just got to remain prudent and the whole point about this road map is it is intended to be cautious but irreversible and we think we can do that because of the success of the vaccine rollout.
“People would really rather trade some urgency and some haste in favour of security and certainty about those dates that we have set out,” he added.
Also at the press conference, the PM acknowledged vaccine passports for international travel would be “a feature of our life in the future” but stressed that, in terms of a domestic certification system, this was being reviewed by his Cabinet colleague Michael Gove.
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